So I put a call out to a couple of email lists I’m on to see if anyone knows of any reading about women’s presence/absence in the blogosphere, and got a generous number of responses with a load of articles, web pages, blog articles, etc on why we don’t see many women online. It was great – and made me realise just how much there is to read and how much I don’t know I need to know.

One article referred to me is what some consider a seminal piece of research into men, women and blogging, Women and Children Last, by Herring, Kouper, Scheidt and Wright. (Kouper and Scheidt organised a panel for AoIR 8 on researching blogs that I’ve been invited to join). In their 2004 study of web logs they found that the difference in number between blogs authored by males and by females was relatively small. But when they divided the study between types of blogs, the results were quite different. The types they identified were filter blogs (blogs that locate and review other web sites), knowledge blogs, or k-logs (blogs focussing on alerting audiences to new information in a variety of topics and fields, mainly technology), online journals (where authors reflect on daily life) and blogs that fit in more than one of the previous categories. Their study showed that the first two types of blogs were significantly more likely to be authored by men than women, and that the opposite is true for the third type.

Thus, given k-logs and filter blogs are more likely to be talked about in media reports (partcularly newspaper and magazine articles about “crazy new things people get up to on the Internet and with what new-fangled programs), in scholarly research articles about blogging, and by bloggers themselves, than online diaries, the blogs that get referenced, and the ones that become “A-list”, are the ones written primarily by men.

(NB: The article also talks about age as a discriminating factor, showing that filter blogs and k-logs are written not just by men but by adult men, and so the vast number of online diaries written by adolescent women are overlooked).

So the authors believe that while women participate in the blogosphere, the “discursive construction” of the blogosphere by mainstream media, academia and bloggers themselves exclude women.

I wonder if this exclusion is due in part to the presumption, or perhaps intention, of the actors in the discursive construction of the blogosphere, i.e. the journalists and academics, that their audience is male. I wonder if this statement just produced makes sense.

Moreover, I wonder if I have thrown my hat into the same ring. I am starting to believe that the reason my research sample has so few female bloggers in it is not because fewer women are blogging about emerging church stuff, but are doing it in the wrong genre. That is, while I have come aross many religious blogs written by women, their focus has been on discussion about daily religious life, rather than explicit discussions about emerging church issues. Thus they don’t present themselves in the same way as other types of emerging church blogs, as ones written by men, whose intentions to engage people in all things EC are done explicitly in their style of blogging, be it filter-type or k-log-type. I must confess I have considered including some blogs in my sample but late changed my mind for their lack of discussion about events, theories, opinions about others’ opinions etc., in favour of talking about personal experiences, emotional respones, private reflections on general theological suppositions.

So I must concede that I have unwittingly excluded women from my sample in exactly the same way as Herring, Kouper, et al predicted I would do. Not sure what I should do about this.

Any remedies come to your mind?